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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24280693">Bedside</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin'>kaeorin</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Loki's Lullabies [55]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anxiety, Avenger Loki (Marvel), Avenger Reader (Marvel), Childhood Memories, Childhood Trauma, Comfort, F/M, Fear, Fluff, Gen, Hospitals, Panic Attacks, Post-Mission, Protective Loki (Marvel)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-03 01:14:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,432</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24280693</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Things go incredibly wrong on a mission, and you wake up in your worst nightmare. But Loki is there.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Loki (Marvel)/Reader</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Loki's Lullabies [55]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>264</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Bedside</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Your entire body felt like it was cast in lead. Cast in lead and then maybe dropped into a fire and then run over by a semi-truck. It was a struggle even to open your eyes, so you gave up for a moment and allowed yourself to simply lie there in the darkness and try to breathe. Everything hurt. At first, the intense fatigue covered the pain, but as you grew ever more conscious, the two swirled together. The combination made it exhausting, painful, just to inhabit a solid form. You let out a shaky breath and did your best to ignore the chill dread that was beginning to settle in your stomach. Whatever had happened to you, you were not in a good place right now.</p><p>“It’s okay.” A familiar voice sounded from beside you, but it sounded weird and almost loopy, like it had to travel a long distance to reach your ear. “It’s okay. <i>You’re</i> okay. Can you hear me?” You turned your head toward the sound and resume the fight to open your eyes. When you managed at last, you closed them immediately. The light was too bright. It hurt.</p><p>You tried to figure out what to say, but it was like this was your first time in a human body. It was hard to coordinate the correct movements and breath to get any words to come out of you at all. The best you managed was a pathetic growl, but maybe that was good enough for now. Whoever had been speaking to you laughed and gently took your hand. </p><p>“You really scared us.” She—whoever it was, it was certainly a she—squeezed your hand carefully, almost imperceptibly. She was afraid of hurting you. A warm rush of gratitude ran through you. “Do you remember what happened?”</p><p>Memories came in flashes. Another generic mission. Thor and Nat. Gathering intel. Distracting a pair of guards while Nat did her thing. The end of a rifle pressed insistently against the small of your back. Ropes. Tools.  A sadistic smile on the face of the enemy. Blood. You swallowed down the panic that threatened to choke you and found a way to make yourself nod. She let go of your hand. It didn’t help the panic, but then you felt a feather-light touch against your temple and suddenly your mind was filled with peace. </p><p>“Wanda.” Your voice was rusty, like you hadn’t spoken in days—or weeks—but now you were certain that you knew who sat beside you. When you opened your eyes again, you ignored the pain of the light and tried to focus on her instead. She was blurry, but it was easy to see when her mouth split into a smile. Something about the walls behind her put your mind on edge and that sick feeling in your stomach returned. “Where am I?”</p><p>She stopped smiling. You could feel the way she tried to double-down on the peace and warmth that she was feeding into your brain, but, with a rush of strength, you pulled your head away from her touch. “You were dying,” she said in a low voice. “You weren’t going to make it back home. They had to. Don’t be angry.”</p><p>She hadn’t said the word, but her response was all the answer you really needed. A sharp, chemical smell began to fill your nose as things clicked into place. A hospital. You did what you could in order to focus on keeping your breathing steady. You were not in any kind of state to spin out into a full-on panic attack right now. She smoothed a warm hand over your forehead, but this time did not attempt to do anything to your mind. Maybe that was for the best.</p><p>“I want to go home.” You hated how the words made you feel. Suddenly you were a tiny child, wailing in a gurney for parents you’d never see again. “Get me out of here. Please?”</p><p>“I go to all the trouble of getting you a private room and everything, and you’re already all set to just throw it away?” It was Tony. You jerked your head towards the doorway—and then had to close your eyes to deal with the sudden dizziness. Maybe this was all a dream. Wanda and Tony, they weren’t on this mission. It was just you, the Asgardian God of Thunder, and the Black Freaking Widow. It was impossible to forget the way your stomach had churned with anxiety on your way out here. You heard him approach your bed and sit in a chair on the side opposite Wanda. </p><p>“I hate hospitals.” It was the closest you’d let yourself come to begging.</p><p>“I hate having to fly halfway around the world because my teammates let another teammate get kidnapped and tortured, but what can you do?” He sounded grim. You wanted to argue with him, tell him that Thor and Natasha hadn’t had anything to do with your stupid mess-up, but your tongue felt like it was too large for your mouth. Talking was impossible right now. Tony was fiddling with his phone. He lifted it a bit and pointed it at you, and the shutter sound of his camera rang out in the hospital-silence around you. “Proof of life,” he explained. He turned his phone around to show you his screen, but you looked away from the picture of yourself. You were definitely not ready to know what you looked like. “Gotta keep the others from hijacking a plane out here. The three of us have got things covered.”</p><p>You wanted to laugh at the idea that you’d be much good at covering anything right now, but you didn’t. Tony’s faith in you was nice, at least, even though it felt entirely undeserved. “How long am I gonna be here?”</p><p>Tony shrugged, but Wanda spoke for him. “They were waiting for you to wake up first. Now that you have, they can get a clearer idea of what’s going on. It won’t be long now.”</p><p>“Speaking of, your shift’s about over, kid.” Tony looked at Wanda from across the bed. “Now that she’s awake, you’d better get some sleep. Between the two of ‘em, I feel like I’m trying to parent teenagers. This one won’t eat or sleep. Loki’s nothing but a shitty attitude. They’re driving me crazy.”</p><p>Before you could really try to make any sense at all of Tony’s words, another voice sounded from the doorway. “She’s awake.” As before, it took too many moments for you to place the voice itself, and by the time you did, Loki was standing beside your bed. His face was cool as he looked down at you. Uh. What.</p><p>“I can stay,” Wanda offered, not making a single move to stand up. Tony started to protest just as Loki shook his head.</p><p>“I’m taking you back to the house. Eat something. Get some sleep. Or I swear to god, I will invent something to make you.” That stern, no-nonsense tone sounded wildly out of place coming from Tony Stark, of all people, but you got the sense that he meant what he said.</p><p>Wanda must have, too. She stood up and bent over the bed to kiss your forehead. It surprised you a little, but you kept your face neutral as she looked at you. “It’s okay,” she said in a low voice. “It’s safe here. Just get better. I’ll be back in the morning.”</p><p>Tony took her lightly by the elbow, then, and led her out through the door. That same panic tightened your stomach as she disappeared from view, but you had to choke it down again. Because Loki was here. He’d taken Wanda’s seat beside you and was just...there.</p><p>You liked him. Secretly. Of course, he didn’t want anything to do with any of you, so you never really forced yourself on him, but you liked to be around him. You watched him a little more than you probably should have. You were hardly the only one in the Tower who did that, but you did it only because you liked to look at him. You knew it was silly to think that he wasn’t aware of your gaze on him, but he never gave any outward signs of paying attention to you, so you allowed yourself to watch him anyway. On the rare occasion that he spoke to you, he was brilliant and sarcastic and funny and...just really nice to talk to. Conversation with him had started happening more often lately, but it was still sort of weird and jarring to see him <i>right there</i>.</p><p>“Thor asked me to come,” he said, as though he’d read your mind. More realistically, he probably just saw your thoughts on your face. You wanted to look away from his piercing gaze, but...you didn’t. “He and Romanoff took off to take care of the people you’d been after, so he asked me to come so I could keep an eye on you for him.”</p><p>He was holding something back. Loki was not really the type who’d just do whatever Thor asked him to. He didn’t need to say anything for you to know that Loki had certainly had his own reasons for being here. But you didn’t press him on it. It didn’t really need to be said. It was just nice that he was here. You chewed on your lower lip, wondering if you had the courage to say that out loud. When he met your gaze, your stomach did a flip. No, you definitely didn’t. The best you could manage was something that you hoped looked like a smile. He returned it.</p><p>The two of you lapsed into silence. The room was hardly quiet, though: machines around your bed kept beeping and whirring, and there was a constant hubbub in the hallway outside your door. As you settled deeper into the lack of conversation, your brain started getting out of control. It took flashes from your childhood and wound them with flashes from what had just happened to you and brought them all to life behind your eyelids. You tried to keep things calm. It made exactly zero sense for someone like you—a fucking <i>Avenger—</i>to be this afraid of something as basic as hospitals. No one liked hospitals, sure, and almost everyone had negative associations with hospitals, but you’d think that, as someone who could apparently survive hours of torture, you could keep yourself fucking cool in a place like this.</p><p>“Are you in pain?” Loki’s voice, as soft as it was, still made you flinch. Immediately you were filled a new rush of self-loathing. But when you looked at him, he looked more concerned than anything else. He nodded towards the heart monitor on the other side of your bed. “Your heartbeat keeps increasing. Should I call someone?”</p><p>“No. God, no.” Your throat was dry no matter how many times you tried to swallow. You quit trying and instead ventured a queasy smile at him. “I’m fine. Just...irrationally afraid of hospitals. Because of course when you think of Avengers, you think of panic attacks over nothing.” You’d said too much, but there wasn’t much sense in freaking out over that now too. You closed your eyes and tried to focus on getting things back under control. The incessant—and rapid—beeping of the monitor seemed to be laughing at you.</p><p>But then your hand was folded between two larger, cooler ones. Just as Wanda had, he squeezed your hand gently. The surprise of that actually did a lot to jar you out of your spiral, but you still couldn’t bring yourself to look at him again. </p><p>He started talking to you. He was telling you a story. He took such care to describe the setting—a courtyard in the palace at Asgard—that you could almost imagine that you were <i>there</i> instead of here. He was a child. He did not do much to describe himself, but you found that you could picture him perfectly anyway: a tiny Loki, big-eyed and solemn, trailing a few steps behind his older brother. He told you about some of the insects on Asgard, insects which reminded you a lot of dragonflies here on Earth, and then he described the way one of them, that day, had gotten itself wound tightly in his hair. It buzzed and beat its wings against his head, and this tiny Loki was too small and frozen with fear to do anything but howl for Thor. Loki filled his words with enough amusement to show that age and distance made this something he could laugh at now, no matter how terrified he had been at the time. For you, it still felt wrong to laugh.</p><p>“You poor baby,” you murmured. “Did Thor help?”</p><p>“I can’t remember.” His eyes were bright and clear as he looked at you, but slowly something like realization began to dawn in them. “Mother says I fainted with fright. I was <i>very</i> small. Someone must have done something, because when I awoke, I was missing a rather large chunk of hair. It took ages for it to grow out.”</p><p>That time, the laughter came easily, and before you could do anything to stop it. When you tried to give him an apologetic look, you found that he was also laughing, quietly, with his other hand partially covering his face. </p><p>He was beautiful. The thought sobered you pretty quickly, but it was true. Something about his body language told you that it had been a long time since he’d laughed at all, and you were grateful that he allowed you to see it. You tried to tighten your fingers around his hand, and they mostly cooperated. He ducked his head a bit, as though embarrassed. You found that you missed being able to see his eyes. “Thank you,” you said, putting as much heat and sincerity behind your words as you could. Whether or not he’d been actively trying to distract you from your anxiety, it had worked. </p><p>He pressed his lips together to hide his smile and nodded at you. “If you swear to keep them to yourself, I’ve other stories I could tell.” He searched your face, then, and must have found the answer he was looking for, because he smiled a little wider and launched into another story.</p><p>He spoke to you for most of the night, falling quiet only when you drifted into sleep. He never let go of your hand.</p>
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